Top 45 Essential Liberty Quotes
#1. They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin
#2. Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
--Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759
Wendy Goerl
#3. Those who sacrifice essential liberty for temporary safety are not deserving of either liberty or safety.
Benjamin Franklin
#4. They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
- written for the Pennsylvania Assembly in its Reply to the Governor, 11 November 1755
Benjamin Franklin
#5. Any society that would give up essential liberty to obtain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Ben Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
#6. Way back in 1755 Benjamin Franklin wrote, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." With
Hillary Rodham Clinton
#7. To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of people always possess arms ...
Richard Henry Lee
#8. When war transcends all boundaries, do the legal and moral categories we have relied upon to channel and constrain violence and coercion lose all value? Do we lose the checks and balances essential to preserving individual liberty and the rule of law? Or
Rosa Brooks
#9. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.
Ayn Rand
#10. The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.
Walter Bagehot
#11. To help the poor to a capacity for action and liberty is something essential for one's own health as well as theirs: there is a needful gift they have to offer which cannot be offered so long as they are confined by poverty.
Rowan Williams
#12. The State may justify a limitation on religious liberty by showing it is essential to accomplish an overriding governmental interest.
Warren E. Burger
#13. Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised.
Milton Friedman
#14. Private property and free trade stand on exactly the same footing, both being essential and indivisible parts of liberty, both depending upon rights, which no body of men, whether called governments or anything else, can justly take from the individual.
Auberon Herbert
#15. Liberty is the essential precondition for achieving virtue ... In order to exercise virtue, we need to have the ability to choose freely.
Dinesh D'Souza
#16. To create a free society is not to accomplish the impossible task of convincing all people to abandon aggression, but to accomplish the essential task of convincing enough people to abandon the belief that aggression is ever legitimate.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
#17. You are wrong. The state and its existence are essential before everything else. All this preoccupation with liberty is not serious.
Habib Bourguiba
#18. I believe that the most essential element of our defense of freedom is our insistence on speaking out for the cause of religious liberty.
Ronald Reagan
#19. Militias, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves and include all men capable of bearing arms. [ ... ] To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.
Richard Henry Lee
#20. To bring about government by oligarchy, masquerading as democracy, it is fundamentally essential that practically all authority and control be centralized in our Federal government ... The individual sovereignty of our states must first be destroyed.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#21. Hitchens: Since we only have one life to live, I can help people make it free as best I can, and assist them in their real struggle for liberty, which in its most essential form, is the struggle against theocracy, which is the original form of dictatorship and the violation of human rights.
Keith Howard
#22. The essential notion of a capitalist society ... is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force.
Milton Friedman
#23. Every man - in the development of his own personality - has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man's essential nature.
[Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment (1963)]
Thomas I. Emerson
#24. If someone is confronting our essential liberties, if someone is inflicting injuries and harm, by God I'll confront them!
Margaret Thatcher
#25. This dilettantish inability to comprehend the essential issues of the conduct of production affairs is not only manifested in the writings of Marx and Engels. It permeates no less the contributions of contemporary pseudo-economics.
Ludwig Von Mises
#26. One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one's house. A man's house is his castle.
James Otis
#27. Liberty and choice are the essential components that constitute human dignity.
Khaled Abou El Fadl
#28. Individual liberty and interdependence are both essential for life in society.
Mahatma Gandhi
#30. I therefore take the liberty of proposing for this hypothetical new atom, which is not light but plays an essential part in every process of radiation, the name photon.
Gilbert N. Lewis
#31. It is essential that all Americans take the time to honor and remember those individuals who gave their lives in defense of our liberty.
Chuck Schumer
#32. Now, one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one's house.
James Otis
#33. In all things essential, unity; in all things nonessential, liberty; and in all things, love.
Thabiti M. Anyabwile
#34. [Liberty] is freedom of choice, a divine gift, an essential virtue in a peaceful society.
David O. McKay
#35. The vigour of government is essential to the security of liberty ... a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.
Alexander Hamilton
#36. The best service that can be rendered to a Country, next to that of giving it liberty, is in diffusing the mental improvement equally essential to the preservation, and the enjoyment of the blessing.
James Madison
#38. In suits at common law, trial by jury in civil cases is as essential to secure the liberty of the people as any one of the pre-existent rights of nature.
James Madison
#39. Liberty is the essential basis, the sine qua non, of morality.
Henry Hazlitt
#40. Most importantly, nothing has happened to change my conviction that freedom and the love of liberty remain the essential defining attributes of our national character as a people.
Ibrahim Babangida
#41. In ten phrases, the ten commandments express the essential of life. And these three words
liberty, equality, and fraternity
do just as much. Millions of people have died for those ideals.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#42. Taxation is not a method by which the community corporately provides itself with essential services, but a fund to be divided between different interests with political claims upon the state.
Neville Chamberlain
#43. The loss of liberty in general would soon follow the suppression of the liberty of the press; for it is an essential branch of liberty, so perhaps it is the best preservative of the whole.
John Peter Zenger
#44. The essential psychological requirement of a free society is the willingness on the part of the individual to accept responsibility for his life. - Edith Packer
When the government fears the people, it is liberty. When the people fear the government, it is tyranny.
Thomas Paine
#45. The United States didn't create religious liberty. Religious liberty created the United States of America. It's the reason we are here today. This is an essential freedom and an essential right and I don't think you give up this right by simply taking a job.
Bobby Jindal
